AN ARTICLE in today's Wall Street Journal is set to increase speculation in the Newisys thrust to produce managed AMD Opteron servers. The newspaper quotes a Dell executive as saying that it "might" use Opteron processors if it turns out they are faster and perform better than Intel's chips.

And the article also says Newisys will seed around 1,000 pilot machines, with Goodyear being a candidate to try out the Newisys-Opteron combo, amongst other corporate users.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Newiys has already given five "computer makers" prototype Opteron machines. The machines, using an X86-64 design, are set to become available in spring next year.

The same article quotes an IBM database manager saying that it will produce DB2 running on the AMD-Newisys machines, and will demo its software next month. Microsoft and Oracle are also partners for the Opteron platform, as well as SAP